Triangular Road: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

takes us safely over the CSX tracks to the lower portion of the riverbank. Here, there’s no log pathway, only the narrowest of trails that seems to drop straight as a plumb line down through the trees and thick
underbrush. We’re willing to risk it, though, because now, suddenly, we hear the river. Slowly, Virginia in the lead, we inch our way down the trail until it finally, unceremoniously, deposits us on a hot, deserted little sandspit of a beach with the James River at its feet.
    First thing is to find someplace to sit that’s out of the sun. A quick search turns up a large, somewhat flat stone that calls to mind the oversized ottoman to an easy chair. Best of all, the ottoman stone is lodged near the water’s edge under a tall, canopy-wide willow oak tree that with each breeze seems to transform itself into a huge East Indian punkah fan over our heads.
    An ideal spot. And, it turns out, we will have it all to ourselves for the entire morning. The rest of Richmond has chosen to spend the holiday elsewhere.
    Recovering from the climb down, we simply sit for a time quietly taking in the river—the rock-bound river. This stretch of the James is a veritable minefield of boulder-size antediluvian rocks that might have been flung there millennia ago by the quick-to-anger God of the Old Testament.
Another one of his commandments might have been broken and, in a tantrum, he had rained down rocks instead of his usual fire. Indeed, the Old Fellow can still be heard fulminating those times when the James at floodtide comes roaring downstream in a whitewater chaos of uprooted trees, hurtling rocks, unmoored boats, drowned dogs, cats, cows and even the occasional human.
    This morning the river is far from floodtide, and the two of us—ladies well beyond a certain age (I’m in my seventies)—sit taking our ease beside it.
    Virginia and I have been friends since I came to live in Richmond over twenty years ago. Our immediate bond was discovering that in our younger days we had both been travelin’ women, who had loved moving around the world. Virginia had lived abroad for years at a time. Her husband, a visual artist, had also been a cultural attaché in various U.S. embassies in the Middle East and Asia—one of few blacks to hold such posts. His tours of duty had seen them living in Egypt, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka for extended periods. All that had been decades ago, though, and my
friend was now a widow and former teacher who had retired back to the state for which she had been named.
    In my case, a job brought me to Richmond. I was offered a position as writer-in-residence at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a large research university in the capital city. It was a two-year contract, another in a long list of such contracts. Like many a fiction writer, I largely supported my “habit” with temporary teaching stints here and there across the country. For one, two and sometimes three years I would teach graduate level courses on writing the short story and the novel. The emphasis in class discussions had largely to do with the craft and techniques employed in the two forms. The list of universities where I taught were legion, and included Yale, Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California at Berkeley, as well as any number of far less prestigious institutions, such as the present Virginia Commonwealth University. Also, this would be my first time venturing below the Mason-Dixon Line. True, I knew that Virginia was not considered
“South” in the same way as Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn; nevertheless I had misgivings. I needed a job, though, at the time. Then, to my surprise, once I completed the two years of my contract at VCU, I was invited to stay on as a permanent member in the graduate creative-writing program. And it would be a tenured position. My first real job and tenured at that! The offer seemed almost predestined, as if it was somehow important that I remain for